Women of Central Australia weave their magic in the world of fine art

"I ALWAYS had this instinct that these women had really clever hands," recalls Thisbe Purich. It was this instinct that led Purich, then an employee of the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women's Council, to the remote Western Australian community of Blackstone in 1995 to hold a grass weaving workshop for 60 Aboriginal women.

Grass weaving is not a traditional pursuit in Central Australia, although the women had experience of spinning human hair and animal fur.

Women of the Tjanpi Desert Weavers show off their work.Credit:Jo Foster

As Martha Protty, a senior woman from the NT community of Docker River, tells it, the idea spread like wildfire.

"All the women got really really excited by it," she says through an interpreter. "We learnt by watching, and we all picked up how to make baskets and in a very short time we all knew how to make baskets."

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Dancing Tjitji by Jean Burke, a member of the Tjanpi Desert Weavers.Credit:Belinda Cook

What began as a project to create meaningful and culturally appropriate work for women in their homelands soon attracted national and international interest.

Tjanpi Desert Weavers, which represents 400 women from 28 communities in South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia, created a giant commission for the World Expo in Hanover in 2000, and an oversized goanna for Manchester airport to coincide with the 2002 Commonwealth Games.

Perhaps their greatest triumph was the grass-woven Toyota LandCruiser that took out the $40,000 prize at the Telstra National Indigenous Art Award.

While they started with baskets, the women's sculptures, often finished with raffia or wool, have increasingly pushed their work into the fine art realm. Last month an exhibition of work produced by Tjanpi women alongside highly regarded Sydney-based non-indigenous artists Maria Fernanda Cardoso and Alison Clouston opened in Alice Springs, the final stop on a two-year national tour.

The exhibition's curator, Virginia Rigney, of the Gold Coast City Art Gallery, says: "People were thinking Tjanpi were just about craft and baskets - by putting them alongside other artists of significant standing, it's acknowledging that they are also of significant standing."

Opening the exhibition, Professor Marcia Langton, the chairwoman of Australian indigenous studies at The University of Melbourne, highlighted the power of the ancient stories that inspired the works, such as the two sisters who knocked out a man with a stick, bound him and kept him in a sand dish at their camp. "This is what we who love art long for; we long for the art that makes the hair come up on the back of your neck,'' she said.

All but one of the works in the show have been reserved by buyers. Several works the Tjanpi created for the Tandanya Aboriginal Cultural Institute for the 2012 Adelaide Biennale, and a separate sculpture of trees, are in the process of being acquired by a public cultural institution. Its works can already be found in such collections as the National Gallery of Australia, the National Museum of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

The enterprise produces about 3000 woven items a year. The women are paid upfront for their works, which are sold at the enterprise's gallery in Alice Springs and through other galleries interstate.

But despite the demand for the work, the enterprise relies on philanthropic support to overcome the costs involved in operating over 350,000 square kilometres.

Tjanpi is known as the "happy face" of the women's council, which delivers services to domestic violence victims, undernourished children, the aged and those with disabilities.

The women speak of the pleasure they get from collecting native grasses, gathering bush food, visiting sacred sites and teaching their young people about country as they go. "We love working, we're busy people, we've got busy hands," says Nyinku Kulitja, a senior law woman from Docker River, through an interpreter.

"We also enjoy seeing young people working. Young people with dark coloured hair. See us, we've all got grey hair now, but those young people with dark colour hair, they are coming behind us and they're all weaving as well."